How Much Do You Know About “Women’s Lib”?

During my years as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I took as many classes as I could in their well-reputed women’s studies department.

When I was required to take a sociology class, I took “The Foundations of Feminism.” For my philosophy requirement, I chose “Philosophy of Feminism.” A literature class focused on works by women exposed me to Toni Morrison, Erica Jong and Ann Petry, among others. So I have always considered myself well-grounded in the history of women’s liberation and its major players.

The film deals with the feminism of the 1960s—usually referred to then as the Women’s Liberation Movement, or, somewhat disparagingly, as Women’s Lib—from the origins of the Second Wave as part of the Civil Rights movement to Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique to the protests at the 1967 Miss America pageant. Despite my studies, I had never heard of the Redstockings, a group whose name derives from a combination of bluestocking, a term for “intellectual woman,” and “red” for the revolutionary left. The Redstockings were critical of the National Organization for Women for focusing on institutional reform at the expense of male-female relationships, of radical feminists for advocating a separatist women’s culture and of socialist feminists for focusing too much on class.

I was also unfamiliar with WITCHes—sometimes the acronym of Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, sometimes standing for Women Inspired to Tell Their Collective History, sometimes meaning Women Interested in Toppling Consumerist Holidays, as well as any number of other meanings. The WITCHes represented the kind of socialist feminism to which the Redstockings were opposed; nonetheless, like the Redstockings they were known for staging street theater protests against capitalism, for reproductive rights and against patriarchal constructions of marriage.

Filmmaker Lee does an excellent job of covering disagreements within the movement. She discusses the major criticisms of The Feminist Mystique, which, like Lean In, primarily applied to white women of privilege. I also learned that Friedan and some other early Second Wave leaders were desperate not to have their movement associated with lesbianism and gay rights—something that is thankfully not the case today.

Lee took nine years to finish the film, which contains interviews with Friedan, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (the Washington, D.C. delegate to Congress), Aileen Hernandez (the only woman to serve on the first Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), Kathie Sarachild (a leader in the consciousness-raising movement and Redstockings member), Frances M. Beal (cofounder of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and more. The film also offers footage and still photos of major feminist events of the period.

Lee created the documentary in bits and pieces while working full-time as a feature film editor and raising a child. Her primary motivation was to document the amazing women who worked so hard to ensure the freedoms that her daughter and other young women might otherwise take for granted. Lee told me she believes that knowledge of our feminist past can transform our perception of our feminist present:

I was a young teenager during the Women’s Liberation Movement, so I knew as I went through life that I had this powerful sisterhood of feminists in back of me. I may not have known their names, but it was a vibrant movement that told me that if something sexist happened to me, I had women to help me and to pick me up if I got knocked down. And that’s something worth remembering. From the legislative successes to the social successes, that’s something that needs to be remembered by girls and women and boys and men. If we know that positive things happened that we’re all living with today, I think that will begin to change the shape of the word feminist.

Whether you think you know everything there is to know about the women’s movement or have yet to look into the history of our feminist forebears, Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation is well worth a watch.

Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation will be screened on December 5 at the AMC Loews Village 7 in New York City at 7:30pm. The film is available for public as well as classroom screenings. Contact Jennifer Lee here to purchase a copy.

Comments

I was 20 in 1970 and embraced the movement with my whole being. It gave me the courage to sue my local police department for sex discrimination in 1974 which was almost unheard of at that time anywhere in the US. I won of course.

Have you heard of Valerie Solanis and her SCUM Manifesto? SCUM stands for “Society for Cutting up Men.” I believe it is now out of print. I read it at the time it was published thinking it would be a hoot. I was chagrined to find that it made a lot of sense to me. She is the woman who shot Andy Warhol.

My mom and I were fully immersed in the 70s feminist movement and read every copy of Ms. Magazine. I’ve never heard of the red stockings or WITCHes. I do know about stories for free children (including The Story of X), girls not being allowed into Little League, Billie Jean King beating MCP (male chauvinist pig) Bobby Riggs at tennis after all his trash talking, the march for the ERA in Chicago’s Grant Park where we dressed in suffragette’s colors (white with blue and gold trim), Shirley Chisholm “Catalyst for Change,” the free-form poetry praising the goddess as well as the hand mirror and abortion photos and “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes” chapter in Our Bodies Ourselves. I’ll be curious to see how much of this made it into the documentary.

As an 18-year-old I was present at a feminist convention in New York in 1967 when a group of lesbians tore off their shirts to reveal t-shirts identifying them as the Lavender Menace, and took over the microphone. I’m not gay, but I was thrilled. Even then I knew the movement had to be for all women, not just a privileged few. Yes, the movement started when the well-educated daughters of privilege voiced their dissatisfaction with being crammed into dollhouses and denied both real work and real pay. But it was always going to have to be bigger than that. That same convention was forced to begin to deal with the needs of women of color and women in poverty as well as lesbians –and the movement grew–painfully, unevenly, but it grew and continues to grow.

Really?
You didn’t know there was a huge rift between Friedan and the lesbian feminists?
Have you never read any lesbian feminism? Rita Mae Brown? Kate Millet? Never heard of The Lavender Menace?
There were black women in the movement too.
I guess that it goes back to the privileged class: White middle class heterosexual women. I try not to forget that just because I am one doesn’t mean everyone else is as well.